1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of textual communication. More particularly, the present invention relates to programmable methods of parsing electronic communication containing textual and emotive content and building message unique response templates to these communications, which are thoughtful, appropriate, comprehensive, and message unique.
2. Background
While it is known that users respond emotionally to their computers, more importantly, it has always been known the users communicate and respond to other users through various degrees and levels of social interaction based on emotional communication. The emotional communication layer is what has been difficult to decipher and encode and few tools are available for users to adequately manage their communications in this vital layer of communication.
Letters, office memos, personal email, and other writings requiring a response are all occasions to answer a textual communication. A large and growing burden of our communication occurs through written textual communication. A significant portion of that is for the purposes of establishing and or maintaining relationships. Unintended ambiguity, either embedded by the sender or perceived by the reader, in textual communication can lead to misinterpretation, which can deteriorate any established or newly formed relationship. What is an ounce of prevention worth? Proper responses in communication can consolidate understanding, solidify nourish and invigorate relationships, many of which are supported by textual communication.
Inappropriate responses to textual communications may at best maintain the status quo and at worst lead to deterioration of the relationship. Counseling and therapeutic methods are currently available for the resolution and rejuvenation of weakened relationships. These methods and techniques offer several approaches to “healthy” communication, which can be adapted to electronic textual communication. However these have physical and logistical obstacles, which often require a therapist or mediator physically present to facilitate or mediate the communication because the emotive perception and response are to a large degree ignored in modern communication and textually very difficult to embed, decipher and respond to.
Deep breathing and visualization techniques can help but responding in the optimal way may also require research and practice most people are not willing to invest in a timely beneficial response. What is needed are methods of dealing with and responding to issues and emotive emissions in textual communication between parties in ways which promote and cultivate healthy personal, business and other relationships. Programmable or automated tools, which will instantly and systematically parse a textual message, with or without emotive content, and fashion a guideline response are needed.
Available Resources
Modern email programs, word processors, publishing software and other device-to-device communication offer electronic tools to allow the receiver to respond to textual communication in customizable presentations and formats. E-tools and application features include wizards and templates to deliver textual output in different and appropriate formats and styles. Templates are based on generally accepted business, formal, chatty and personal styles. Styles, standards, placement, punctuation, thesaurus, spelling and grammar checking tools are mostly aimed at aiding the user to deliver presentable, not embarrassing, textual responses. Spell checkers and grammar checkers are very useful but they have their own limitations as well. For example these tools cannot handle homonym errors and organization. These require human intervention for anything more than mere style and format issues. Small word substitution mistakes altering sentence meaning and purpose can be missed by even the most conscientious person, unless checked closely. The subject matter, cognitive content and emotive content are generally beyond today's wizard and application tool scope of capabilities.
Books are excellent sources for illustrating good writing principles for clear understandable communication so that receivers can draft responses to textual communication. Books on the general topics like Business Letters for Busy People, Letter Writing, Memo Writing etc can be found in most libraries. These teach various formats, standards and styles. Some offer common sense heuristics and devices such as using active voice over passive voice, logical structure and organization, positive attitude tone etc. These can alleviate some of the responders problems if the concepts are fresh or well learned and recalled by the responder at the time of the response. The problem is that most textual communication occurs without the benefit of these aids, limited as they are. Most of these aids have been converted to software and programmed wizards which can do as much or nearly as much as the book resources teach and can do these much more quickly and efficiently. However, these template wizards have severe limitations and concentrate mostly on presentation, not content. Dealing with communication content is a magnitudes tougher challenge, which has eluded even Artificial Intelligence researchers.
Responder's Block
Writer's block can turn into “responder's block.” At times we are at a loss as to how or where to start a response. We are lost somewhere between what is proper and what is effective to write in the time allotted. At times, all the correct sentence structure and grammar in the world will not help us to draft that best response, even if we had all the books at our finger tips or embedded in our memories. Presentation and format will not help at that juncture. Occasionally, a format and style template can be a good starting point but it is somewhat generic, rigid or perhaps time consuming to find a generically applicable template for an appropriate response. E-Tools and program features in our current word processors or email programs cannot help because response needs to be personal and message unique, the communication cannot be “mechanical” and must be accomplished in a timely fashion. Research time for an effective best response is usually not available. Moreover, the message may be of a highly personal nature, and not a communication one can turn to a third party for aid in crafting an appropriate response.
Available word processor templates that can be of even marginal help are too simple and one-dimensional to be of much value to solve some of the problems mentioned above. Email response templates appear on the market today and this area cries out for some e-Tools as outlined above as well as for word processors. Today's word processors, publishers and email programs do not help a user to handle the myriad of life's real world communication under everyday unique circumstances. Circumstances which either do not allow time to research for a timely response or are too personal or unique to use one of the available templates. Today's word processors, email programs and publishing software do not identify or address the unique subject matter, relevant issues and or emotive content in a textual communication. What is needed are software tools that will address the emotive content layer in textual communication and help one jump start a real life unique or perhaps highly personal textual response to a received message.
Personal Aids Used in Drafting Responses
Occasionally, in responding to textual communications, one will manually copy a portion of the incoming message to the outgoing response message with bracket markers to indicate that is the portion of the message, which they are responding to immediately following. Typically a portion of the incoming text is copied with accompanying indication that it is a verbatim copy with angle brackets indicating the strings of received text, which will be followed by response text. Then the response portion is edited in below to show the sender that they were understood on that particular item and this is the response to that subject matter. This is a manually intensive method of responding comprehensively and thoroughly which requires several steps. From the sender's standpoint, this type of response message lets them know that they have been “heard” and that at least their message was considered. If there is no mention of the senders subject matter or partial mention on the senders topic a misunderstanding develops because the sender does not know if the receiver “heard”, “heard” but does not care, read over it and did not see the subject matter or is saving their response for a later communication.
Reflection of the subject matter involves repeating back to the sender that which they expressed in the communication and which gives the sender the acknowledgment that the responder's communication is focused on and in fact dealing with the senders topic. What is needed are ways that automate this process so that the responder can spend more time actually writing the response and less time copying, pasting and editing.
Ambiguity and Complexity
A general problem in responding to a transmitted communication may be due to its complexity or ambiguity. One can read and reread a received textual communication and still be at a loss at starting an appropriate response, for any of a dozen reasons. Many have been offended by some memo and responded inappropriately, only to find out later that they misunderstood the communication entirely. A sage or therapist friend was not available at the time and an error was made in haste. At times we are under time constraints to “get something out” and we make the fatal mistake of not responding to the appropriate subject matter or worse, hurt the sender's feelings by not responding with adequate concern to a cry for help in cryptic fashion embedded in a portion of the received message. A quick response will not work to maintain a relationship or rebuild a friendship. What are needed are methods and tools which alert us that there is a problem transmitted in the communication which we need to address, a problem which is embedded in the ambiguity and complexity of a seemingly innocuous message.
Reaction vs. Response
Another general problem with responding to received textual messages is that the message may be emotionally charged as a perceived personal attack. In this case we may react instead of to respond. Our emotions can get in the way and sometimes a cooling off period is unavailable. These are the moments where an old sage or therapist would tell us to sleep on it or advise us to draft that “angry” letter response and throw it out before drafting the actual response. What is needed is a sure method to begin a response communication, which will insure that we respond to everything in the received communication in the appropriate fashion.
Turing Test
In looking for programming aids, machine intelligence simulating human response is a good first step in the direction of the Turing Test. The Turing Test is one of the most famous challenges in Computer Science. The imitation game, known as the Turing test, was introduced by Turing to decide whether a concealed responder was a human or intelligent computer program. The basis of the Turing test is simple. An interrogator can communicate with two subjects by typing messages on a computer terminal. The interrogator knows that one subject is a human being and that the other is a computer program, and it is his task to guess which is which. The computer program tries to trick the interrogator into making the wrong identification, while the human being assists the interrogator to make the correct identification. The more advanced programs even tried to show some emotional response to make them appear more human. These attempts at emotive response were unilateral and not stimulated by the sender's questions.
Software designed to read and tokenize grammatical sentences using the various grammar models; simple syntactic structures and complex structures can be found in the literature, public domain, free ware, shareware and commercial business arena. Parsers using dependency approaches based on lexical representation and grammatical rules or the processing of discontinuous text, speech transcripts, incomplete sentences, technical texts are freeware, shareware and commercially available. These software packages can be programmed to tag noun phrases (NP), most verb phrase combinations (VP), apposition of NPs, non-finite structures, passives, small clauses, expletives, binary branching, etc. In fact tagging used to determine the most likely parts of speech for words in a sentence (determiner, adjective, noun, verb past and participle), are freely available in a de facto standard by Brill (1994).
Overall, these programs although a good start in programmed response, have yet to be applied to the textual communication applications of email, word processors or electronic publishing. At least a good part of the reason is that the emotive content heretofore has been an elusive component of textual human communication. Parsers have not been able to token out the emotive states and their associated emotive intensities because average text messages alone carry too much imprecision and ambiguity. What is needed are parsers that can parse textual communication for emotive content which can provide meaningful methods of response.
Application of Available Parsers
Electronic parsers are many and well known. One skilled in the art of programming parsers or compilers can program a reflective parser, which could be modified for our purpose. Programs like ELIZA and DOCTOR were built mostly for the purposes of Artificial Intelligence using application of Rogerian techniques in the early 80's. However, Rogerian technique modified use in computer wizards, tools or automated textual response assistants are non-existent and have not been applied to textual, response applications outside the AI arena as demonstration examples of Turing applications, software “toys” or Rogerian therapy examples. Although parsers have become more and more sophisticated enabling the Turing Test results to continually narrow the man-machine conversational/intelligence gap, the gap still exists. This indicates that a computer program is still not capable of drafting full responses to received electronic communication.
AI's attempts at creating a system that would exhibit real common sense failed. The failure may have been due to the fact that none of the approaches addressed the emotive content layer in basic human communication. It is the parsing and understanding of the emotive tokens that eluded success by most NLP projects. Furthermore, symbolic AI failed because the cognitive obstacles could not be overcome. It is the emotive state and intensity that drives action and weights the subject matter in importance and priority. What is needed are automated tools which will provide common sense and understanding of basic human communication at levels which include the emotive layer and meaningful interaction with the logical, lexical and grammar layers.
There are two basic kinds of language analysis paradigm: the statistical, automatically generated language models from literature, and the linguistic, manually coded language models based on intuition and corpora. Some are based linguistic methods, and are amply documented and evaluated in international language engineering or computational linguistics conferences and publications such as ACL and CoLing since early 1990s.
For some levels of language analysis, statistical analyzers are relatively quickly implemented and trained. Morphologically rich languages where statistical methods have not performed well argue for the linguistic option. Either way, NLPs are available for many applications.
Embedded Emotive Content
One reason that communication can be ambiguous or complex is the presence, or lack of when needed, emotive content to disambiguate the text and words onto the intended meaning out of a number of possible alternative inferences. Methods for embedding emotive content by a sender have been developed in U.S. patent application '624. These can be used to add emotive content textually or graphically to textual transmissions. When emotive content is purely textual, the response is further complicated for reasons such as imprecision in emotive intensity or ambiguity for lack of a more complete description of the emotive state. If emotive content is presented graphically, complexity is increased because the receiver is subjected to overtly emotional component much harder to ignore. Here, the responders must “search themselves for an answer” to transmit to the sender and they wish the response to be correct and appropriate. Today, the receiver cannot take good advantage of computers to generate unique response messages through the use of ordinary societal behavior protocol or proven therapeutic and psychological techniques in responding to theses received textual messages. Moreover, available communication techniques are little applied outside the professional help arena. What are needed are automated methods, which help a responder start a response communication in the right direction, using proven therapeutic and good communication techniques.
Response to Emotive Content
Individuals may at times not respond to the embedded textual or graphical emotive content for any number of reasons. Some responders may wish not to address the emotive content because it makes them uncomfortable. They may not recognize that they are receiving emotive content or they may only recognize partial subjectively perceived emotive content. Responders may not have the language skills to formulate their response and may withhold addressing emotive content for fear of making matters worse through incompetence. Alternatively, responders may knowingly overreact or act wrongly in their reaction, giving them added hesitation or reluctance to attempt to identify and address emotive content. At times, relationships that are predominantly maintained through the back and forth passage of written communication can get bored or strained from conditions occurring to either or both parties. The response to very subtle messages can be vital to a personal or business relationship and a perfunctory response ignoring or not addressing portions of the received message can not only strain but even be fatal to the relationship. The conversational or communication objective in a response should be to remedy the situation and restore fairness no matter how subtle or blatant the message. Ways are needed to provide the capability to discover problems in a more comprehensive, positive, cooperative manner and give appropriate notice to responders where to take extra care with message components.
Therapeutic Resolution
There are branches of counseling, therapy and psychology which have developed optimal response techniques to various situational communications. Mostly these have not been useful in textual communication because the techniques require physical proximity or physical information such as facial expressions, body language, non-verbal and aural clues. Such communication skills such as reflective listening, eye messages, active listening, and empathy can be used but are applicable in a physical visual and aural setting. What is needed is the application of these known successful techniques in textual communication and response. Some, like Rogerian therapy have been applied in natural language parsers, novelty programs and AI research applications.
Rogerian Response Therapy
Computer programmed response was studied by Joseph Weizenbaum, who coded ELIZA at MIT during the years 1964-1966. The ELIZA program consisted of two stages. The first stage used a parser to extract information from what the user typed into the program input interface, while the second stage used a script to formulate a suitable reply which was then displayed to the user. Weizenbaum developed a script for ELIZA, which simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist. Another implementation is commonly known as DOCTOR. This was an “intelligent” program which acted as a Rogerian psychotherapist, attempting to draw the patient out by reflecting the patient's statements back to him, and in this fashion encouraging and leading the patient to derive his own solution. Rogerian therapeutic techniques have not been used to help users in formulating responses to every day modern textual communications, even though the capability has been around for some time.
The need to guess or infer the likely emotional state or personality of the application user is rendered unnecessary if senders are able to embed emotive content directly within textual communication. The functionality, which provides users themselves, ways to embed emotive state and associated intensity along with their textual communication, is contained in application '624. Moreover, a mechanism used to obtain, gather or infer the users emotive state, could be encoded into any of the emotive state glyphs or mechanisms described in referenced application '624 and transmitted along with any textual communication. The Rogerian model has not been used in conjunction with embedded graphical emotive content, which adds another dimension to the possible response capabilities in terms of “human likeness.”
What is needed are electronic methods and tools which can quickly scan a received textual transmission and address all of the salient subject matter and emotive content. In addition, to register the transmitted emotive content and start the textual response for responders so that they can begin from a response template custom tailored to the received message. So that the responder can write, finish and reply in a well thought out and well felt, comprehensive, common sensible and emotively appropriate response.